Confusion over Patrol missions and red map contact icons
 

Greetings Captains.

I'm trying to do the first Patrol mission of the campaign and have chosen the British Coastal Waters area on the eastern coast of Britain.

Noob question ahoy:

1. Is it like SH4 where you can just sit within range of the patrol mission marker icon for so many hours? Just how close do you have to be to the area marker and how many hours does it take?

2. Do you have to do the patrol missions first before attempting to complete your specified tonnage target for sinking ships?

3. If I spot a contact some ways off the patrol area, should I try to engage it or would this reset the patrol mission progression because I moved some crticial distance from the patrol area marker?

4. How are some of these map contacts being detected? I just had a contact icon for a merchant show up about 26 km from my patrol point and there's no radio contact event listed for that lat/lon position. How was this detected? My sonarman announced nothing.

5. I'm assuming the red contacts showing on the map many miles away from my current position related to the Radio Contact Events listed in the Captains log screen? If so there sometimes seem to be more contact icons than there are events listed in the log.

6. It seems contact icons are vanishing at closer zoom levels. I usually put a marker point down using the pencil on all contacts so I can build up potential shipping route information (if indeed these are modelled in the game). When I zoom in at closer zoom levels, the pencil marker still shows but the red contact icon vanishes. Is this normal?

7. What is the point of the Send Status Report button in the Captains Log screen?

Needless to say all these questions should have been answered in even the most rudimentary manual, not the half-assed, cheap, lazy effort we got. I fear the SH series is turning into a low priority cash-cow project for Ubisoft and is nearing it's death if such a low-budget attitude like this is being taken :(

Thanks for any help.

1. It's 70km around the east coast of England, it's 250km in the open Atlantic later on.

2. Nope. The patrol objectives are just for renown.

3. Nope, engage at will! In some cases it might even complete the patrol objective.

4. Single merchant contacts just appear, they don't list a time or anything. Radio contacts appear as well, but you get a message box message for them. TheDarkWraith has managed to time stamp ALL contacts, even the single merchant ones in his UI mod. Otherwise you have no way of telling when they appeared, so therefore where they are "now".

5. Yup, the "extras" are probably single merchants.

6. Yup, the radio report was just a "in this area" type report, so not a specific location.

Thanks for the clarifications. I'm tempted to install the TheDarkWraith mod but I'm concerned it will introduce more confusion for a noob like me due to complexity and bugs. I'm wondering if I should wait till I get used to stock gameplay as well wait for later versions of the mod to weed out bugs? Or Am I being too wary?

Install it now .

Okay, it's downloaded and making its way to my MODS folder for installation.

Stand Back!....I'm going in :)

Make sure you only install the correct folder and then merge which ever dials combo you want then enable with jsgme .

If you have trouble installing, I've made a helpful video that explains it all! :DL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVv1qgyivPI

Installation went okay and I went for the Metric American dials. Some serious work went into this mod :)

It looks very promising but sadly there were a few too many irritations for me to stomach and I've uninstalled it, maybe until it matures further. My problems are:

The SH4 style icon commands could do with tooltips for all buttons. It seems only the main buttons have a tooltip but most of the sub-buttons don't so I have no idea what some of them do. There was a tooltip for the F1 help button so it seems it can be done.

As the author mentions, some of those buttons act erratically. The Crew button occasionally CTD'd me and clicking on the first icon under the sonar and radar main buttons sent me automatically walking through the sub until the view exited the sub.

When the Crew button didn't CTD me, it showed lots of sub-buttons, presumably for crew abilitiess, but they seemed to extend past the icon block for CO2, Battries etc. I guess it's due to a resolution issue. I play in 1680 x 1050.

As far as I can see the crux behind the mod is to give everything a SH4 feel. I never did get too into SH4 and totally familiar with it's interface, so there's no real need for me to have SH5 look like SH4.

I had SH4 only for a short while and rarely played it before binning it because it was too bug-ridden for my tastes. As a newcomer, it was also too much of a pain in the arse to get into thanks to the developer and Ubisoft's piss-take attitude towards documentation and code quality - I fail to see how they can justify being so seedy in this regard. Quite how they expect to grow the fanbase and get new blood into this frachise with this attitude escapes me. There's a real sense of this franchise becoming a cash-cow with no real efforts, other than those of all the fine modders out there, to imrpove on the quality of gameplay and documentation. I just want something to quickly get into without having to research all the best mods to install to twist the game into something it should be from the start (or at least be close).

I'll soldier on with SH5 and stock UI for now but at this stage it looks like the devs and Ubisoft really haven't learnt from past mistakes and criticisms of SH4 and I fear SH5 may be the last time I bother with this series.

I often wish Sonalyst was still in the game business producing sub sims. Ubisoft need some competition and a severe kick up the arse to stop them being so apathetic towards the development and quality of this series.

Expect lots more noob questions from me as I struggle on with trying my best to give SH5 a fighting chance :)

:o

erm, SH4? The default install is SH5 Enhanced. Almost identical to stock, but with extra features. There's nothing from SH4 in the default install. You have to go out of your way to make it like that. I'm confused...

Was it this you installed ?
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=166093
http://www.filefront.com/16461333/Ne...DarkWraith.7z/

Hmm something odd happened then because that's not what I got. I didn't do anything particularly cumbersome.

The file I downloaded had the name:

NewUISH5_0_2_0_byTheDarkWraith.7z. I'm suspecting this isn't the right one?

I'll revisit this mod again to find out where I went wrong. I'm in the middle of updating my Nvidia drivers at the moment and about to restart. Will report back.

Okay I see where I went wrong. I assumed there was only one Darkwraith UI mod and saw the file I mentioned in the previous post at the top of the Downloads section list, so I grabbed that.

It seems I should have grabbed the file named:

NewUIs_TDC_2_4_1_TheDarkWraith.7z

Will give that one a run. Hopefully it will revitalise my rapidly depleting enthusiasm to get to grips with this game.

I'm beginning to think the devs need an additional development phase for any future releases. This phase would include giving the game over to a select team of modders to tweak before they finally release it to market ;)

Everything installed fine. Many thanks to Kylania for that very helpful installation video by the way.

I just opted for the minimal dials options and nothing else for the moment. I'll experiment with the other mod options as I get deeper into this.

I've previously manually edited the SH5 command.cfg file to activate some other commands I wanted, so finding that there are also key settings to edit in TheDarkWraithUserOptions.py to make sure nothing conflicts with my personal perferences is going to be a slight chore, but nothing serious.

My first impressions on this mod after checking it out from a save point during the tutorial mission is WOW :woot:

What an amazing difference. I just hope the SH5 engine doesn't put too much constraint on what modders can change and SH5 can be transformed from its hideously dissapointing stock state into something that we all really should have gotten right out of the box. Now if only the shameful documentation was as easy to mod ;)

Hopefully all the improvements I'm about to experience will spur me on to sticking with SH5 much longer than I would have.

Before I sign off to go get to grips with my new modded SH5, could I get calrification on question number 7 of my original post? Is this an important function and how and when should I use it.

Thanks for all the help with my questions and a big shout out to all those involved in bringing us this great mod.

Basically nothing. If you're close to German shores sometimes planes will come attack, but I'm not convinced that anything else happens when you use the button. Usually just a "thanks" radio message in return. Maybe extra renown? Certainly not a wolfpack appearing or anything.

Damn there's some seriously cool Python scripting wizardry going on in this mod besides the visual improvements :)

I like the new features for the Navigation map, especially with Reaper7s colour shipping lanes mod.

I see the new UI mod also provides two conversion charts called TabelleMin and TabelleStd. Does anyone know if there are versions translated to English before I try and adjust them myself? I'm fairly handy with Photoshop but I'd prefer not to butcher the German language in my noob attempt at translation :)